


you and me, alone at sea

by cloverlady



Category: Bugsnax (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, kinda fluff and kinda despair!, maybe???, mention of cigarettes, mention of drugs, much like the bugsnax themselves :], no drug use, spoilers?, takes place after the good ending so they're not part of the snakdragon anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:13:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29058027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloverlady/pseuds/cloverlady
Summary: Lizbert remembers, long ago, that Eggabell often said she'd like to live on a beach.
Relationships: Eggabell Batternugget/Elizabert Megafig
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50





	you and me, alone at sea

**Author's Note:**

> hello all!! this is my first fanfiction in A While and my first bugsnax fic! i decided we could use some more liz/egg content. also if you didn't read the notes, this takes place after the good ending, where they're back in their un-snakified bodies. hope you enjoy!

Lizbert gathers up the Sweetieflies with one hand, holding the bundle she's collected in the other. She waits until they rest and picks each one as it comes. They sit obediently in her paw, not trying to flee, even when she gently ties them together with a long blade of grass. 

"Egg," she calls, lifting her head, "look. Got you a bouquet!"

Eggabell looks up and smiles at the gift. It's a recreation, a joke, a repeat of the first anniversary they spent on the island, and it makes them both laugh softly. 

Eggabell takes the cluster of bugsnax offered to her, only to set it down, untying the blade of grass and letting the Sweetieflies go free. They stare at her for a moment- something like reverence in their wide googly eyes, or hope, perhaps. Eggabell keeps her mouth shut until they scatter.

Lizbert isn't upset. It was a bouquet of cigarettes. A beautiful, jade-encrusted opium pipe, or, most crudely, bags of white powder, of sticky green clumps cut with paper or cornstarch or god knows what, with cutesy messages written on the plastic, smeared sharpie, hearts on each "i".

It's not darling anymore. It's a reminder of a time when they didn't know any better. Hindsight is what makes it a joke. And there's tension under the laughter.

When they're done fooling around in Garden Grove, they make their way down to the Springs. On such a walk they might've held paws, swing them idly, comment on the beautiful scenery of the island. They are holding paws, but Lizbert can't bring herself to focus on the scenery today. All she can feel is the sweat gathering between their palms.

The sauce that grows in the springs is a good, forageable food source. But even better than that are the things that wash up in the tidepools. Shells, sometimes empty, sometimes still full of meat. Starfish, urchins. Tiny silvery fish, quick enough and slim enough to slip out of the jaws of predators and wind up here, uncaught. 

They don't try, either, to catch them. They sit there and watch as they skirt the edges of the tidepools, flickering in the shimmery water, tailfins brushing up the sand behind them. They watch the fish as intently as they once watched television. There is life outside of Snaktooth. Beyond the blank, unyielding blue of the horizon is a whole earth abound with life.

But the fish are a rare treat, and they're always gone by the next morning. There are none today.

There's a oyster, though. That's something. Liz grabs it, drops it in the basket at her side. They'll bring it home and she'll pop it out of its shell and cook it for supper. It's strange to see food that doesn't have eyes. 

Eggabell's off to her right, plucking sauce pods off a plant. They go everywhere in a pair, always within earshot, eyeshot. They'll glance up at each other, and if Lizbert looks fast enough sometimes she can catch concern fading off Eggabell's face. But nothing will be wrong. Eggabell will smile pleasantly, as if they were strangers catching each other's eye at a coffee shop, a smile which Lizbert will reflect back at her. And they will carry on.

When Lizbert looks up, though, Eggabell isn't looking back. There's tiny bodies moving around her. Lizbert yanks her hands out of the tidepool and shoots to her feet.

Eggabell isn't swarmed. All it is is a little herd of Kweebles. They roll onto their backs and wiggle their tiny legs, they coo, they play. They nudge her with their spoon noses, rubbing against her like needy cats, and Eggabell scratches them absentmindedly with her free paw.

She looks up at Lizbert and waves. Lizbert waves back. Everything's fine. She's got it.

Lizbert doesn't turn her back. She watches, just in case. Eggabell gets up and moves to another sauce plant and the Kweebles follow her like a line of ducklings. They don't crowd, or fuss, or try to crawl up her fur. It would've been cute. 

Egg takes a break, coming to rest under a leaning palm tree. Lizbert grabs her basket and joins her, and her groupies. She thinks she'll let Eggabell eat the oyster. There's not enough meat in the tiny thing to share. Sauce is good enough, but there's only so much variety in the same few flavors. It'll be a good treat. 

The Kweebles don't scatter at her approach. They welcome her, they clamor to greet her, to be the first to nudge her. Lizbert pets them down like impatient dogs as they take turns bopping her legs. 

"You alright?" she asks.

Eggabell nods, sighs, "Hot today."

Lizbert sits beside her, and the Kweebles scurry, finding places to nest in between them. Eggabell seems to appreciate their affections, and indulges the one that's laying in her lap like a fat little pug, rubbing its round, fuzzy tummy.

One of them noses the basket Liz was carrying. Inside, the oyster jostles. Liz has the urge to hide it, to snatch the Kweeble away, before it sees what she's gathered. For a moment she thinks she's being ridiculous. Then she remembers where she is. What she's lazing in the shade with.

Lizbert grabs one of the sauce pods and chucks it a good distance away. It lands with an unmissable _SPLAT_ and the Kweebles stiffen, then jump up and bolt for the chocolate puddle, away from them.

Eggabell looks dismayed for a moment. Then, resigned. She lost herself too- she understands. They can't get comfortable.

Lizbert puts an arm around her. Eggabell leans on her. They watch the Kweebles gobble the sauce down like hungry puppies.

She wonders if they really even like the stuff. Do they even need to eat? Surely they do. But do they like it enough to be ravenous? Maybe they want her to think they do. They want her to think they don't depend on her for anything. Like the way they pretended they didn't want to be caught until they were captured, and then they sat obligingly still, waiting.

Egg slouches, pressing all her weight on Lizbert. She's asleep. It's not safe to be asleep out here. Lizbert should wake her up, take her home where she can rest safely.

But there isn't any safe rest, not really. Even at the house they sleep in shifts. They wait at the foot of the bed for the sound of little footsteps in the soil, the bed which they never get a chance to share anymore. Eggabell takes the first shift. She's supposed to wake Lizbert up at midnight so that they can swap, but she didn't last night. Or the night before.

"I used to work graveyard shifts when I was a student, remember?" she said that morning, and every other morning when Liz opened her eyes and it was sunrise, "I'm fine."

Lizbert remembers. It was a billion years ago. Eggabell would fall asleep on her then, too, on the couch or in the car driving home.

Lizbert takes her hat off. She rests it on Eggabell's head, tilting the brim to keep the sun out of her eyes. In the shade, they look dark and exhausted. Eggabell stirs, turning her head, nuzzling her nose into Lizbert. She starts to snore.

They both snore. Lizbert remembers this, as if it were something new. She learned it when she and Eggabell first moved in together, into that tiny apartment that was close to their universities. The rattle of the cheap air conditioner, the dirty shorn carpet, floor-to-floor, flickers of headlights shining through the singular, tiny, dirty window. It's surreal to think about now. Like a dream she had when she was younger.

They'd talk about dreams, back then. They'd talk about the future. About marriage, a house, jobs, family. They'd quiz each other about it. A rental in the suburbs or a fixer-upper in the countryside? A big ceremony with lace and trimmings, or courthouse papers and a bottle of wine? Endless nights of parties and drinking and a spare bedroom for friends, or a house so full of family that it spilled out into the backyard, little paws on the grass, swings swinging, shouts of childish laughter? 

The answers would change almost every time they thought to ask. The world seemed so expansive then, so limitless, the paths their life could take uncharted and vast in number.

Lizbert remembers, long ago, that Eggabell often said she'd like to live on a beach.

The Kweebles are gone now, long ago trotting off into the sandy undergrowth. But the island is loud with bugsnax still, their chirpy voices distant and indistinct, blending into a cacophony not unlike the rhythm of the tide in front of them. The waves come up, lap at the hot sand, recede back into the ocean and carry their currents away.

Lizbert feels awful. She promised Eggabell a future. Instead, she stole every one of those dreams away. There's nothing for them on Snaktooth.

Well, there could be. She can imagine it. A baby, maybe two if they're lucky- no more than three, she thinks, smiling to herself. 

They'd be precious, the best of both of them. Sand dusting their fur as they made castles on the beaches, or snow, when they built snow-grumpuses in Sugarpine, or dirt as they gathered flowers and stomped in the mud. Lizbert would teach them how to climb trees and tie knots. She'd tell them everything she knew about survival, and about the old civilizations that lived here before them. And Eggabell would be on her case, telling her not to scare the kids, having a heart attack when the branches creaked. 

But at the end of the day, they would come home, and she'd be there in the glow of an evening campfire. And they'd smile at each other when the children had been tucked into bed. Lizbert keeps thinking about it, smiling even more.

She kept thinking. And the more she thought about it, the more nightmarish it became. Babies were completely defenseless. They didn't know what was food and what wasn't. The tiniest ones, the newborn pups, couldn't even keep their mouth closed if something was pressing at it.  A baby was too floppy, too weak. A day would pass, maybe two, no more, and they'd look over into the crib and see a cluster of bugsnax crawling out, and no trace of their baby. She could already hear Eggabell screaming in horror.

Lizbert shook her head. No, that wouldn't do.

And besides, a sardonic part of her piped up, they already were mothers. Bugsnax were children, in the most pessimistic sense. Little parasites that whined and needed and sucked the life out of you until you died. Lizbert pictured an ant colony, child upon child, sibling after sibling, all crawling endlessly in service of one, overexhausted mother.

She'd had a roommate, back in college, before she and Egg moved out of the dorms, who was an entomologist. He took care of ants. Huge tanks of them, for his senior thesis. Lizbert would help him tend to them sometimes, filling their little feeders with honey and sugar water, watching them scurry around the sandy tunnels of their nest. 

Her roommate had told her that ant colonies were not, in fact, monarchies. The queen was important, but only for founding the colony, and supplying it with more ants. It was the workers who made the decisions, collectively, and especially about their queen. They decided where to put her, where to cart her brood off to after it had been laid. When she ate, what kind of food she was allowed to eat, how often. They would tug at her legs to move her and hold her down when they decided she needed to be still. Until they were done with her, she was at their mercy.

"And what happens after?" Lizbert had asked, "When they're done with her?"

The answer was simple and obvious. Her roommate didn't even have to look at her to say it.

"They eat her."

When Lizbert opens her eyes, Eggabell is shaking her. The sun is setting. It's getting dark.

When had she dozed off? Lizbert glances herself over. No carrot legs. No shishkebab arms. No naptime snacking. Not this time, anyway.

"Let's go back." Eggabell says. She's still wearing Lizbert's hat.

Lizbert thinks it looks cute on her.

They pick up their baskets, scavenged from the remains of Snaxburg, things left behind in the rush to leave that survived the thundering violence of the volcano and the stampede of frenzied bugsnax. Eggabell needs both hands to hold hers, full to the brim with sauces of all flavors, the chocolate ones she plucked in the afternoon piled on top.

"Nothing today?" she asks, nodding to Liz's basket.

It feels lighter than it should. Lizbert looks down.

The oyster is gone.

Somewhere, she thinks, in the vastness of Snaktooth, a Kweeble is hopping around. And the rest of the colony is very pleased with it.


End file.
